11/19/2013

Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) is here to stay. Companies are excited about the potential cost savings and added productivity. Employees are happy to use the personal devices they love and gain the flexibility of working away from the office. But before companies and their employees can enjoy all the benefits, significant hurdles lay in the way. So we partnered with Ponemon Institute to study the BYOD market and better understand the challenges companies face in taking advantage of this new phenomenon.

In total, we surveyed 895 IT and IT security specialists primarily at supervisor level or higher. Respondents represented enterprises of all sizes (with the majority in large organizations) and across a diverse range of industries including finance, healthcare, retail, government and industrial. Overall, the main conclusion that we’ve drawn from the findings of this study is: while companies are open to implementing a BYOD strategy within their business, the security solutions to fully enable adoption are in their infancy.

Grasping for More
More than 60 percent of respondents say their companies support BYOD; however, 46 percent of those companies do not use tools or policies to protect corporate data. Of the companies with current BYOD security products in place, 60 percent of respondents are unsatisfied mostly due to cost and inadequate security, and 56 percent are looking to replace their current solutions.

In addition, more than 40 percent of respondents say their companies have limited deployment of BYOD. The top reasons include employee resistance to loading security products on personal devices (35 percent), inadequate security solutions (28 percent) and cost of security products (13 percent).

These findings are valuable in understanding companies’ BYOD needs and provide a great opportunity to evolve BYOD security into solutions that will enable confident adoption among the entire employee base. Whether the top priority is data security or employee enablement, a new approach is required to meet company data security needs and employee demands of control, convenience and privacy. We have developed that fresh approach.

Making the Most of BYOD
By streaming Exchange data to mobile devices, instead of controlling the devices themselves, employees experience convenient access to the office from their personal devices without allowing sensitive information like customer data and intellectual property from being stored on the device. When a device is lost or stolen, IT departments don’t have to scramble to wipe the device, because the data never resides on the device. Better yet, employees can use their devices for work without ever losing control, convenience or privacy.

To learn more about the survey findings and how our unique approach, which never allows corporate data to be stored on the device and allows employees to maintain privacy and control, may better meet your BYOD requirements, please register for our webinar featuring Dr. Larry Ponemon.